Burning Man 1995 Trip Report

September 1-4, 1995

What is Burning Man?

a festival of art and music where people are creative without being commercial

an orgy of heathen debauchery where adults, teenagers, liberals, "artists", women,
homosexuals, and, yes, even children, toss morality to the wind and engage in sex, drugs,
mud restling, satanic rituals, and, the worst of all, rock music, while dressing up in costumes
and dancing and worshipping flaming pagan icons

four days, during which, the most stupid question you could ask is "Where's the parking lot?"

a fun way to spend labor day weekend

a fiasco where a bunch of city kids get together in the desert and get lost despite the fact
that they're always in the right place

an illustration of how all religions got their start, before the next generation took it seriously

what you'll look like when you get back unless you use lots of suntan lotion

I'd never heard of it until I went to this party at my friend Don's
place. He had printed out the
burning man info from the Web
. Almost like a
pad of paper it was so thick. Before I knew it, I had stopped
deciding whether or not to go and I was trying to decide whether
to take my bicycle along.

The village is designed to be a small self-sustaining community,
with shops and places to visit and things to do. A security
force, several radio stations, a newspaper, streets, and lots and
lots of people.

The most amazing thing that I noticed was the almost complete
absence of outside world commerciality. When you go to the Bay to
Breakers, every sign, every piece of paper, everything, has some
brand name of some huge corporation that contributed something for
the privilege of blasting its identity on some surface so that
large numbers of people will see it.

At Burning Man, nobody was selling Coke or Pepsi or, in fact, any
commercial product. Vehicles and products that people brought had
their brand names on them, but that was about it. No giveaways of
free candybars that are covered with grainola so you think they
are healty. No invasion of teeshirts or carrying bags from some
corporation. No fly-over banner planes or blimps. Hand-made
signs. Advertising was sold in the newspaper, but it was for
camps and "businesses" at Burning Man only, and it was paid for by
barter. This is a policy enforced by the organizers.

The location is the Black Rock Desert, an hour or two north of
Reno Nevada. The playa (PLY-a) is a dried lakebed of cracked mud,
offwhite in color, almost like potato chips cut to fit together
like puzzle pieces. It goes on for miles in all directions and is
very flat. The first vehicle that drives over the playa, unless
it is slow and careful, breaks up the chips. Subsequent vehicles
can kick up substantial dust.

The lake fills up part of the year. Over the centuries, the mud
has been leveled as best the laws of fluid mechanics can do it.
This leads to a unique space where you can look out and see for
miles and miles in all directions. In my memories, I keep on
visualizing certain places being downhill or uphill from each
other, but none were.

The materials they sent me told of all sorts of wild events and
camps.

For instance, Winter Wonderland Camp was where someone brought
white fuzz cloth and little props to make it look covered with
snow.

"Chaos Camp: Like to stay up late at night and make loud noises?
Chaos awaits. Location: far out n the NE quadrantof our camp.
How far out depends on how chaotic things get."

"Art Car Camp: Art Cars of all kinds will converge on our camp
from every corner of the nation. You too can have an art car.
Bring your vehicle to the Art Car Workshop and convert that
ordinary clunker into a unique object of truth and beauty."

I decided, jokingly, that I wanted an art car. My old car was
getting old and there was no way I was going to invest in getting
it repainted properly. I bought a new car more than a year ago,
but I couldn't bear to get rid of the old car - it was trusty and
cheap and great for rugged situations where minor scuff marks and
damage was not a problem. I'll probably drive it into the
ground.

Some people ask me about the gender balance. Now think about it -
which gender wants to go hang out in wilderness, spend a few days
without a shower, and watch stuff burn for entertainment?
Surprisingly, there were some women there, about one for every two
men. HEY FEMALES, HEAR THAT?!?!!? THERE'S LOTS AND LOTS OF GUYS
HERE SO COME BY NEXT YEAR FOR CERTAIN!!!

Friday

I drove up with Mike Shuster, who had some job working with the
people outfitting the fireworks in The Man. He was going to
rendezvous with them by watching for a bottle rocket they will
shoot up at 11pm. We were supposed to arrive at about 7, but I'm
not the most punctual person in the world.

So we arrived on the playa. We drove in the night through
dustclouds, each following the one ahead. Miles. It was a good
idea to not drive directly behind someone else; you couldn't even
see them. This lead me to start fearing that somehow the path
would evolve away from the right path. After not too long,
however, we started seeing lights on the horizon; we drove to
them. A cluster of tents and cars, more sparse on the edges.

Right as we pulled into camp, a bottle rocket went off. It was
11pm. This was the signal. We drove toward it and quickly Mike
found his friends. They had already had quite a time. Someone
made some remark about how someone touched some woman's breasts.
There was a joke in there that I didn't get.

Making camp is a bit funny. Normally when you go camping, there's
trees and little clearings, so each clearing is a campsight. On
the playa, however, it's one big floor. Park your car anywhere.
Your campsight extends out to the furthest scattering of your
posessions.

After we got settled, Mike and I headed out to the center of the
village. As we did, we were careful to note local landmarks that
could be seen at night; most notably, two flags and a pole with a
red and blue light at the top. Then we headed in.

We were invited to "Tiki Camp". It turned out to be a sortof
barter saloon. Look for the palm tree props. All we had was a
bottle of vodka. We cut a deal where they made some sort of
blender ice drink for a bunch of people including us.

They had a stage and a band in the center of the village. Behind
that was a cafe which was one of the few places to spend money.

I found the art car place. At nite it was a bit spooky.
Nobody was around. There were already some cars there. I
talked to a guy. He said to bring my car by and they'll take care
of it.

There was this fast food place named McSatan's. A spoof on
McDonalds. Never got any food there, but I think they cooked food
sometimes. It might have been barter also, like you bring in food
and they cook it.

There was this woman I met. She said "Wanna touch my breasts?"
Not really knowing what to think, I answered what any red blooded
american boy would have. She pulled away her jacket to reveal
this plastic form of oversized breasts she had taped to her upper
torso. So I got to touch them.

So Mike burned out at about 2am. I stayed around a few more hours
and then tried to find my car. No luck. There were two high
landmarks you could see at night: the radio tower, and the burning
man itself (it was lit up with neon). I remember approximately
how they looked when I left, but that narrowed it down to hundreds
of cars and tents. Everything was dark. The red and blue lights
had been turned off. The moon had set. The only time I could see
anything was when a car turned its headlights at what I was
looking at. This was true about half the time; people were still
arriving and even light from two miles away made a difference.

I heard the beat of music in the distance. I followed the beat
out into the desert. There were other people, and cars, making
this trip, in either direction. I had heard about this place: the
Rave, a place to go dancing late. The distance was enormous. You
walk the distance there, but you only got about half way. So you
keep on walking, and it seems to receed as you approach it.

I finally got there. Some scaffolding and a dj playing music that
never stopped. Props hanging from the scaffolding, blowing in the
desert breeze. No drinks, no services, just music and people. I
danced and napped and watched the sun rise. In the light, I
walked back and finally found my car.

Saturday

So, I guess I should do the art car thing. "Look, this is pretty
weird. Are you sure you want to do this?" A car like that is not
exactly the vehicle of choice for a first date. But I had another
car that was good for a first date. I packed up everything and
drove over to the art car kamp. Nobody was awake yet so I had to
find something to do.

There were two people nearby talking about a footrace. Apparently
it was going to happen in a half hour; assemble under The Man.

I signed up. The guy running it had apparently contacted
Runners World magazine and had gotten official-looking number tags
to wear on our shirts. This was the only promotion I saw in the
whole weekend. Those who were running naked were instructed to
write their numbers on their ankles rather than attach the number
tags with the supplied safety pins.

They took us out into the desert in a truck. Way out. They
figured that if they had us running away to a distant place we
couldn't even see, it would take the rest of the day just to round
us up, so instead they trucked us out three or four miles away,
and had us run towards the village, which we could see. The
finish line was under The Man himself. I had heard about the heat
of the day, but I had arrived at night, so I wasn't exactly sure
what to expect.

From that distance, everything is a speck on the horizon. The
whole camp was dots along the horizon. Nothing had height, not
even the four story Man. As we ran, the sun climbed out from
behind the clouds it was hiding behind, and the radiation began in
earnest. You know I'm used to running along a trail with
landmarks so I know each location along the way. But nothing was
stopping me from running in an entirely different direction - it
was miles in all directions to the nearest object that would
present the most minimal of obstructions. Suddenly, I was
running. And running and running. The crowd had scattered into
the fast and the slow. I'm not a particularly good runner. No
immediate danger, hey, there's several other people in the race,
and the truck is stopping every mile or so for water. But I knew
that if they all disappeared, if suddenly I was transported two
weeks later, in the same place at the same time of the day, I
would be out of luck and would really have to depend on my
wits and my ability to walk miles and miles before I could wet my
lips and put on some suntan lotion. And the way it was, its
flatness, you could walk for miles and miles, and it still looks
like you're at the same place. And the sun was scorching like a
laser beam, a beam that was so wide it covered the whole playa.
And we were running, panting, to get to the finish line.

It hurt, you know the hurt in your collarbone?

I finished in the middle of the pack. We all congratulated each
other, even the late stragglers. Prizes were awarded for the top
ten. I think I was number eleven. It was 10am; I had been at
Burning Man for only 11 hours.

The guy who did the Art Car Camp himself, Tom Kennedy, had a car
that was a huge shark (see back of my car, or else check out
the art car web site
). There also was a distinctive car
that was a
VW bus with two huge shark fins coming out of the top,
each aligned with a wall of the bus. But the best art car was
this one van that looked like it had a huge insect draped along
the top of it, with legs oozing out to the sides. After a minute
you realize that the bug on top is made from the body of a VW
beetle. You have to see it, it's wild. The people inside had
some story about driving around the country; the concept of a job
or source of income didn't appear to make sense to them when I
inquired.

Tom described the process. This is a workshop. They would help
me paint my car; they don't do it themselves. They have paint,
brushes, cleanup stuff. Oh, and I should solicit people to help
me. Some other people were there to help me out; it wasn't clear
what affiliation they had, they were just people.
This one woman,
named Penny Smith, helped me pick out a theme, so it wouldn't be
just random junk. Then they all left me alone. They all went off
with the people in the next camp, who were the Disgruntled Postal
Workers. They all had real USPS uniforms. I think they went off
to the Drive-By Shooting Range. Something like that.

So I started painting a few formulas. The brush was old and not
very good, the paint had partly dried in the can, and I really
didn't like the job I did. The paint was running in places, and
I'd wipe it, and the wipe would go all over the place. After
about an hour or two, I decided to stop and consider what I was
doing. Actually, I felt like erasing everything and forgetting
the whole thing, but it was too late for that.

Then, people started to come back. Penny helped me out. She just
started asking people if they wanted to paint something. About
half the people she asked, did so. These were just random people
who happened to be milling about around lunchtime near the center
of camp. Soon there were about a half dozen people painting
things on my car, in different colors, and all I had to do was to
make sure they didn't paint something like a pig wearing a police
uniform. I plan to continue using this car, you know. Maybe not
for first dates.

It was amazing what these people came up with. Some of them knew
nothing about science and just painted what they wanted. Some of
them had PhD's in biochemistry and were afraid to commit to a
chemical structure because they thought that maybe they'd
misplaced a nitrogen. I decided that it was better if there were
mistakes in it. Some people just wrote error messages or other
cryptic statements from computer systems they knew. There's
things on there that I'll never understand; the people who painted
them are gone, lost in the crowd. I decided that this car wasn't so much a cheat
sheet or a reference text, it was a description of what science
and technology looks like to people. Formulas have mistakes.
Never is it entirely comprehensible, by anyone, even the owner.

While I was there getting painted, Don and Ann, my friends,
arrived. Don took me around the corner and showed me a red flag.
"That's where our campsite is." He said he had some sort of red
four wheel drive, not his usual car.

So the paint had dried reasonably well and I drove my car out to
get to where Don's camp was. I drove around the corner, and
looked toward the red flag that Don had showed me. To my horror,
there were about twenty red flags of different kinds visible,
above the crowd of tents and vehicles that could be seen. Square
flags, triangular flags, flourescent orange flags. In addition to
several random red flags, there was a whole encampment surrounded
by red flags. This must have been the largest assembly of red
flags in the whole village.

I drove around looking for Don and Ann. I looked for their red
vehicle. Didn't know what to look for because I had never seen it
before and I had forgotten the brand. Had never seen their tent,
either. I drove around looking for red 4x4s, looking at the
people. Some campsites had no people in them. Guess they took
off for the day. Maybe THAT one is Don's. No, over there. Some
of them had people who were wearing big hats, or sunglasses, because the sun had
come out in full force by now. I've never been camping with Don
before, I usually meet him at night, don't know what he looks like
with a big hat on, probably like anybody else.

Meanwhile, I was afraid to drive it around too much; I didn't want
to pick up too much dust in the fresh paint.

So I was looking at people, hoping for a look of recognition back.
That's it, Don would recognize my car. "Yeah, you, I know you.
Here, this is where you're supposed to be, right here." That's
what Don's look would say. Unfortunately, I now was driving an
art car. EVERYBODY was looking back with a look of recognition on
their faces. "Hey, cool car, man!" People would call out to me,
congratulate me. Some were the people who painted on the car.
Many were people who looked like Don or Ann at first glance.
Don was nowhere to be found. I was famous and I really didn't
want to be famous. I couldn't believe it.

I finally found them when I was driving around. Actually they
found me. They led me back to the camp. Finally I had a place to
call home.

So I parked my car and started settling in. I cooked some food
that really needed to be cooked and we had lunch. There were
clouds over the playa. I thought this was desert. Maybe this is
desert. Maybe it's normal for there to be clouds along the edge
of the lakebed and swirls and what is that? People said it was
rain in the distance. Maybe they heard it on the radio. Streams
coming down from clouds. I decided to set up my tent.

We had everything under a tent or a tarp when the storm hit. It
came up pretty quickly. Suddenly, instead of rain, it was a
duststorm. The wind was blowing really hard. People's stuff was
being blown away from their campsites. You know you just set your stuff down on the
ground because nothing is moving, and a half hour later, it's all
someone else's stuff, and your stuff is scattered over a quarter
mile swath starting at your campsite.
But you can't get it now. Sand was everywhere and it was impossible to
see. I dove into my tent. Even inside my tent, there was dust
blowing around.

So I came out of my tent, stuck my head out while the duststorm
was going on. Don had taken cover. Ann was there laughing,
tangled up in the cords and nylon of their tent. She must have
gone and visited the Tiki Camp. The wind had died down enough for
Don and I and some neighbors to untangle Ann just in time for the
rain to hit. It didn't last long, but was intense while it was
going on.

The storm had been amazing. All loose lightweight objects had
been blown into some other campsite, then wetted and rolled in
white dust so it blended in with the playa. I was thinking for a
monment that this was some preplanned socialist scheme to
redistribute possesions among the participants. Nawwww.

The sun dried everything up in about an hour.

There were lots of fireworks all over the place, most of which
were not officially sanctioned. Heck, there was no office to
sanction stuff like that. That night, we went to this band that
made a big deal about how they were going to torch some stuff. So
they spent all this time on the buildup and then they took so long
everyone was piseed and we were all throwing matches at it to
start it off early and yelling at them. So finally they lit it and
it didn't burn well so it sortof sucked. Right when it started to
burn, suddenly it started to rain. Like mad. We all ran back
home, but by then the rain had stopped. I ended up changing
clothes. Don and Ann went to the rave.

I slept. Too tired from the nite before. More stars than you
have ever seen before, the biggest possible sky above your head.

Sunday

So Sunday morning, I got this idea that I wanted to go on a bike
ride with Ann's mountain bike. When you have a bicycle there,
it's so liberating. It's so much easier to traverse the
distances. There looked like a storm might be coming, so I left
quickly to avoid it.

But not quickly enough. I took a spin around the village, but
about half way through, it started raining seriously. Suddenly
the playa surface became slippery mud. Well, hey, I'm doing this
for physical fitness, right? So I decided to just fight it, I
switched to a lower gear and struggled. It was a completely
different game riding a bike under those circumstances, and I was
getting into it, but that's when the hail started. I quickly ran
to someone's tarp; they let me stand under it despite the fact
that I was drenched and muddy.

The soil of the playa assumes a myriad of forms. After the rain
stopped, it became muddy clay. Not only could I not ride the
bike, I couldn't even walk it. Every rotation of the wheels would
add another quarter inch of offwhite mud. The excess would be
scraped onto the forks. The caliper brake areas were huge globs
of mud with cables sticking out. The back wheel was frozen.

I finally found that it was easiest to drag the bike back to camp,
letting both wheels slide sideways in the mud, while grabbing the
seat to pull by. When I got back to camp, we were trying to pick
the mud off the bike. Don actually found a CD stuck in the mud in
the back tire. That's a normal sized CD; someone down the way had
a bunch of them as part of their theme camp and one had gotten
buried in the tire.

Here we were in the desert. It was hot, the sun was beating on
all exposed surfaces in full brilliance. But it was raining at
the same time. I looked up and sure enough, straight up was a
dark rain cloud, and off to the side, the sun was blazing.

Navigation was always a problem. It was not unusual to spend a
half hour finding your campsite, especially at night. You would
remember where your camp was by noting landmarks. In normal
camping, you notice characteristic trees, bushes or rocks, none of
which move. None of these are available on the playa. Instead
there are tents, cars and flagpoles. Tents are erected and
removed. Cars are driven away or moved. Flagpoles change their
flags.

As time went on, more and more people were arriving. Since a
street was nothing more than a space between two campsites, new
people would end up camping in the middle of them, changing the
neighborhood layout.

Even the Man himself, one of the most prominent icons in the sky
day or night, and essential for finding your bearings, was
eventually burned, and it disappeared from the sky.

Order did not come until I used a compass and got a reading off of
the main radio tower and navigated home that way every time. Just
getting the angle from the radio station was enough; I could get
to my campsite from any direction.

The radio station was bizzare. Actually there were several; it's
the ideal place for weak pirate fm stations. Gone are the usual
FCC regulations or even typical societal restraints. Imagine Live
105 or KALX with no FCC restricting it and no requirement to be
profitable, correct, constructive or even polite.

So sunday night came and they had the celebration to burn the man.
It wasn't nearly as spectacular as I had anticipated. The left
arm never really caught fire and they eventually pulled it down.
It was pretty weak. Then they burn this other thing that's some
sort of sculpture inspired by sex organs. That was OK. There was
lots of other fireworks and stuff around. I guess some people
just show up Sunday day for this - I think they missed out on most
of the fun.

So we end up in this place that's like a typical SF niteclub.
Instead of a back wall, there's some scaffolding to make it look
the same. Everything looks like a disorganized mess, but music is
blasting and people are up on the floors of the scaffolding. They
don't even look like musicians, they're just throwing out
drumsticks. They're throwing drumsticks into the audience,
sometimes one at a time, sometimes handfuls.

So at first I didn't really want to get too into this, someone
might get hurt by a flying drumstick. But I ended up with a
drumstick in my hand, and everyone was beating theirs. There was
a big piece of rusted wreckage in front of us, I don't know what
other people were beating their drumsticks against,
there was metal stuff and wood stuff there and just stuff to bang against.

And as the crowd made the music, it all made sense to me. This
drumstick, it wasn't some musical instrument. It was THE musical
instrument. It was the first musical instrument ever, and was so
fundamental to a human that he must do it. Other instruments
are needlessly complicated and distracting.

It wasn't a musical instrument. It was a metaphor. A man's daily
bread, one slice a day. His chopsticks, which he eats with. His
car, which he drives with. One bath a day. One shit a day. The
chair he sits in. The shirt he wears on his back. A boy and his
dog. A farmer and his plow. A lumberjack and his axe. A
carpenter and his hammer. A barber and his scissors. A knight
and his sword. A cook and his rolling pin. A soldier and his
rifle. The power of one human making its own music, not dependent
upon any central music facility, the music speaks for the human
because the music comes from the human.

Well, ok, so I had two drumsticks in my hand, and most everybody
else did too. And nobody was taking baths in the desert this
weekend. But I had a nice time.

Monday

I couldn't sleep that night. As the sun was coming up, I decided
I had one last chance for a great bike ride. And, if you don't sleep, you have lots of time for other activities.

I decided I'd had
enough of this infinite desert thing. I wanted to get to the
bottom of the issue. Or, the side I guess. So I took the bike out and rode
and figure I'd ride and ride until I got to the edge.

So I rode and rode. And I rode and rode. And I could see the mountains getting
bigger. Sortof. You can see playa with maybe a few
tire tracks immediately in front of you. But the
land goes off into the distance, then you see these mountains rise up from the
horizon. But you think you can see how far away it is, it's just over there,
so you keep on riding.

But I was used to it by now. You cover what you thought was the
distance, but you're still far away.
It was a bit scary, sortof like, how much more effort am I going to
invest in this? It's just going to take that much longer to come back.
But look, it's just over there, not much farther.

So, you cover what you thought was the
distance, but you're still far away.
It was a bit scary, sortof like, how much more effort am I going to
invest in this? It's just going to take that much longer to come back.
But look, it's just over there, not much farther.

It wasn't hard to cover what I thought was the
distance, but I was still far away.
It was a bit scary, sortof like, how much more effort am I going to
invest in this? It's just going to take that much longer to come back.
But look, it's just over there, not much farther.

It wasn't hard to cover what I thought was the
distance, and then I saw the mountains converge to the playa, and I
could see land that wasn't playa, actually some wet spots, a bit of grass.
Nothing exciting. But it was good to reaffirm that
the playa was in fact finite.

That morning, there wasn't much else to do but pack up and go
home, so that's what we did. Say goodbye until next year!
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